


Everything We Never Said

by JennaCupcakes



Series: Must I Give Up [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Coming Out, Crushes, Cuddling, M/M, ace Hermann, ace newt, ace relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-03
Updated: 2016-07-03
Packaged: 2018-07-19 22:04:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7379149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JennaCupcakes/pseuds/JennaCupcakes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Newt has a few regrets about his drift with Hermann. Namely, that he's had a crush on the guy for a while and really doesn't want him to find out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everything We Never Said

**Author's Note:**

> This fic must be the most self-indulgent thing I’ve written in a long while. I’ve always wanted to write about ace!Newt, and now I’ve done so in what is probably very heavily based on my own experience with asexuality. I did not write this fic with the intention of portraying how asexuality plays out for everybody. Rather, I wanted to write about the insecurities I’ve experienced, and how they sometimes make it hard to connect with people when romantic feelings are involved.  
> If you feel like you need some warnings for this fic before reading it, please do not hesitate to message me (I’m also on tumblr as veganthranduil). I would not say that it deals with heavy themes, but I recognise that people experience these things differently.  
> Lastly, I want to thank everybody who reads this. If you can relate a little bit, I would appreciate a comment or kudos, but like I said, I wrote this fic for myself first of all. Everything else that comes now is a bonus.

If he lived through this, Newt vowed, he was never going to make another online joke about ace people loving dragons more than sex. Or beings that looked like dragons. In that they had scales and tried to eat people.

Okay, Kaiju. He was talking about Kaiju. He was sure that not all ace people were as fascinated with the Kaiju as he was. Newton, as a Kaiju-obsessed, tattooed mess, was giving the ace community a bad name.

This didn’t even count as the weirdest thought he’d had in the past ten hours, he thought, as he clambered up the body of the first Kaiju baby known to mankind with minimal personal protective equipment and a third improvised electrode he was going to jam straight into what he hoped was the dead baby’s secondary brain, it was just that he was tired and his thoughts started to get all mixed up and he’d already drifted with one Kaiju today and now he was going to do it again, just for the hell of it. And some part of him was beginning to think this wasn’t a good idea, no matter how awesome the thought of being not only the first human who attempted a drift with a Kaiju (tissue sample), but also the first human who did it again, and with a mostly intact Kaiju brain sounded to him. He was awesome.

So maybe this was a bad idea and he’d die of five different kinds of cancer in his early forties. Or this would fry his synapses and he’d die instantly, in a blaze of neural glory. In his books, it was almost surely probably all worth it.

“Newton!”

The familiar voice, normally instantly recognised and countered, threw him off in this unfamiliar setting. He blamed it on the fact that he was currently busy with electrode positioning that his brain didn’t immediately catch up and order him to turn around and snap at Hermann for daring to interrupt him at such a crucial point of his life. Also, he’d been making a point about asexuality, he was sure about that.

“New _ton_.”

Wait, _Hermann_ was here?

Newt turned around and almost slid down the scaly, slimy exterior of the dead baby Kaiju. It occurred to him, suddenly, that the body of Hannibal Chau was still in there, and for some reason that grossed him out more than the tissue and goo spread all around this dock. Hermann was standing some twenty feet away from the dead baby, hand wrapped tightly around his cane, staring up at Newt with an expression of unmistakeable disapproval.

“What are you _doing_?”

Newt held onto the Kaiju with his gloved hand to prevent himself from actually sliding down the back and uncomfortably landing on the asphalt seven feet beneath him. Even though he was sure he could manage landing on his feet, it would probably hurt. And a sprained ankle wouldn’t help his case. He still had some of the wiring to attach before he could get to the mind-melding part.

“Chau found me an intact Kaiju brain and I’m going to drift with it,” he called, “Because I would like to know more about, I don’t know, the _cloned alien war machines_ that are attacking my planet and if this all-or-nothing plan some people conceived will _actually work_.”

He began clambering over the back of the baby Kaiju, which he’d started calling Smaug in his mind, to get to the second interface cable he’d thrown up here (the only problem being that his throwing arm wasn’t the best and he’d been kind of shaky, so his aim had been like… way off). He could feel Hermann’s eyes on him, but the man was uncharacteristically silent.

All the better for Newt. This kind of work required precision, and not of the mathematical kind, but of the biological kind, which was infinitely cooler and infinitely more complicated. He’d already built a makeshift drift interface today. Nothing could stop him.

He fixed the last electrode in place, surveying his work carefully. He’d only get one shot at this, he knew. It was kind of exhilarating and kind of terrifying. Everything seemed to be in place.

“Okay, Smaug…” he muttered under his breath, and then began clambering down the body to where he’d set up his drift interface. This brought him face to face with Hermann, who was still radiating disapproval like a heater stuck at its highest setting. Luckily, close to ten years of working experience with Hermann had taught Newt to ignore this kind of thing. At some point, he’d learnt to just block Hermann out.

Newton’s hands were shaking; he realised that as he began typing the necessary parameters into his computer. It made exact numerical configurations hard, but he could do this, he just had to erase _this_ part and hit the _right_ letter this time…

“Newton.”

Hermann said his name like he’d been trying to get Newton’s attention for some time now, only this time he punctuated it by grabbing one of Newton’s typing hands (his _dominant_ hand, this wasn’t _fair_ ) and yanking it away from the keyboard.

“Newton, you’ll kill yourself.”

“You said that the first time,” Newton reminded him, giving the hand Herman was holding onto an experimental tug and realising the man meant business. He wasn’t going to let Newton go back to typing before he had made his point. Only Hermann could turn concerned hand-grabbing into an authoritarian gesture of well-meaning dictatorship. Bastard.

“Yes, and you almost died. I’d rather you wouldn’t push your luck this time.”

“You realise that I have like, a limited time window for this thing, right?” Newton used his free hand to gesture in the direction of Smaug. “So I’d appreciate if you saved telling me how wrong you think I am for after I’ve proven that I’m right.”

Hermann wasn’t letting go, but there was something strange going on on his face. It looked like two Hermanns fighting with each other and any minute now, the Incredible Hulk of Interpersonal and Scientific Frustration would come bursting out of Hermann to… give Newt a stern lecture, probably. Hermann’s ways of showing his anger always involved copious amounts of lecturing. Newt wondered if that was what too many years in German academia did to you.

Hermann’s hold on his hand tightened.

“I’ll do it with you,” he said, and Newt wasn’t sure he understood him correctly.

“You what now?”

“I’ll do it with you. I’ll drift with you and the Kaiju. That’s what the Jaeger pilots do, isn’t it? Share the neural load?”

“Oh my god, I can’t even--” Newt stopped to tell Hermann how wrong he was for a second. “Wait, that might actually work.”

This terrified Newt on several levels, the least of which was that he’d had to call Hermann right about something for once.

Drifting had always been scary to him. In his books, anyone who felt sane enough to let anyone else into their brain wasn’t in any way sane at all, but probably a pathological exhibitionist with no sense of personal space. Sure, Newt overshared in conversation all the time, but even then, revealing something too personal could always be played off as a joke or shrugged off. And now that he’d already drifted once, he knew there was no hiding – it had been bad enough having to give away anything to a Kaiju, not thinking of things that _Hermann_ might find in his brain.

It occurred to Newt that he’d just classified drifting with alien invaders as less terrifying than drifting with his colleague of a decade.

The flipside, of course, was going in alone again. Bravado or not, if Newt died he wouldn’t be able to stick around to rub it in Hermann’s face that he’d been right the first time around, and more importantly, any information he could gather might be lost.

“So well do it, yes?”

Hermann looked anxious to the point of throwing up, Newt decided. He had always erred on the sickly side of pale but today, he was white as a sheet, and the neon lights of Hong Kong didn’t help with that. Maybe Newt wasn’t the only one here who was scared of this.

“Yeah, man.”

Newt’s mouth felt dry. After all, he tried to reason, Hermann probably wouldn’t be terribly interested in Newton’s mind if there was a shared alien consciousness to withstand. Newt might just get lucky.

Hah. As if he was ever lucky.

“Say it with me, man. We’re going to own this bad boy.”

Of course, Hermann wouldn’t do the sensible thing and just high-five him.

\--

When Newt was twelve, he’d graduated from his local _Gymnasium_ as a wunderkind that basically none of his teachers knew what to do with.

It had also been the year he’d had his first girlfriend, Elena, who was his age and six grades under him. They spent three awkward weeks holding hands during breaks before Newt graduated and Elena broke up with him. She’d cried a lot, and he sort of felt like vomiting through the whole thing and afterwards she went away with her friends and he just sort of sat around under a bunch of trees like the looser _without_ friends that he was.

That was the extent of his romantic experiences for a really long time, until PhD three to be precise, when he’d met Antoine who was an exchange student from France at MIT, roughly Newton’s age, and really into making out with hot biologists in the lab after closing hours. Newt had been twenty at the time, and kind of nervous a lot because he’d never had a relationship, and he didn’t even dare to ask Antoine if that was what they had because that might have made it awkward. They broke up before they could do anything more adventurous than take each others’ shirts of, also because, on one memorable occasion, Newt accidentally triggered the fire alarm in the lab. Antoine went back to France, and Newt felt a kind of guilty relief that it was over, although he’d genuinely enjoyed spending time with Antoine.

When he was twenty-three, one of his lab-partners set him up with a cousin, who was tall and blonde, an IT-technician called Daenerys, or so she claimed. She was three years younger than Newt, and flirted with him throughout the entire evening. Newt later classified this as the most awkward evening of his life – not least of all because afterwards, when he’d walked her home and she’d asked if he wanted to come upstairs, he’d looked her straight in the eye and said that he couldn’t because he had papers to grade. At half past midnight on a weekend. She’d looked slightly put off but took the whole thing like a champ, giving Newt a gentle peck on the cheek and he’d walked home feeling, again, terrible but also guiltily relieved.

It was around this time in his life that he came across the term _asexuality_.

Up to then he’d always thought his lack of partners stemmed from a lack of peers actually _his_ age, because dating was kind of hard when the entire department had put you down as the cute kid biologist and everybody else just kind of knew you as the guy with _insert-number-of-his-PhDs-at-the-time_ PhDs. But when he clicked himself through forum post upon forum post, he realised this wasn’t it – he had dated, he’d even had crushes, but he just wasn’t into sex. After that, he more or less continued with his life as it was – with the notable exception of refusing dates with friends of friends _beforehand_. Daenerys hadn’t deserved pre-asexuality-discovery him. She probably deserved someone who liked dragons more than he did. Newt wanted some time to figure out what he would even get from a relationship, and also, who had time for dating when there was science to be done?

When Newt was twenty-five, an unknown alien creature emerged from a rift at the bottom of the Pacific, laying waste to San Francisco and the surrounding coast before being brought down by the combined efforts five countries’ military forces, at the cost of thousands of lives and a radiation cloud that hovered above half the northern hemisphere for months.

It was also the year that Newt made the acquaintance of Hermann Gottlieb, a German quantum physicist from Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Newt had always thought that this town didn’t really exist but was rather a name made up by Americans to mock the German language). They spent the next four years conversing through the ever-increasing attacks, and Newt felt _satisfied_ for the first time in his life, despite the fact that his civilisation seemed to be coming to an end. What first began as frantic conversations in scientific jargon over two fields evolved into something quieter, more personal. He and Hermann shared similar visions and ideas, and with each new attack they shared their fears. Newt bemoaned the lack of good beer in Boston, and Hermann complained about the food and hipsters in Berlin. Newt sent Hermann the American early releases of books on quantum physics, and Hermann sent back a year’s worth of _Peter Lustig_ shows after Newt confessed that the children’s show had been his guilty pleasure all through PhD number five. Newt brushed up his German again – unlearnt after so many years in America – and wondered if Hermann spoke with a Bavarian accent.

In his conversations (email exchanges, nothing more) with Hermann, Newt found something he often denied himself in person – emotional honesty, through the medium of an intellectual connection, and no strings attached. Hermann, half a continent away, would never end up asking more of Newt than what Newt wanted to give. He remained safely in Newt’s email account, always at arm’s length, where Newt couldn’t possibly fuck up their relationship by wanting too much and too little at the same time.

When they met, in the late autumn of 2017 at a breach conference for European scientists in Rotterdam, it turned out that Newt, in this relationship of whatever it was, might be the less difficult partner.

\--

It turned out that two consecutive drifts on the same day made Newton incredibly hungry.

He’d been sitting on this bed for what must have been twenty minutes, and coincidentally, that was also the time he’d last seen a nurse or doctor. He was staring at his shoes, or rather, what was left of them under corrosive Kaiju slime and Hong Kong harbour mud. It was a miracle they hadn’t made him take off his clothes as a health risk on the spot, but then again, there was a lot going on in medbay right now and the stuff Newt did or did not choose to poison himself with wasn’t a high priority for the moment probably. At least until it was his turn to be examined.

Maybe it wasn’t the drifting that had made him so hungry, Newton thought. It was roughly eleven pm by now, but he wasn’t exactly clear when it came to the date, and that made him wonder when the last time he’d even eaten _was_. Probably right before his first drift. He’d had the last of Hermann’s secret _Sauerkraut_ stash then. Now if he could only recall when that first drift had _been_. Drifting, Newt decided, really fucked with your time perception.

They’d stuck Hermann in a different room, where he was probably being treated right now, because the guy had looked so pale that they’d hooked him up to an intravenous solution right away. Newt couldn’t blame them, Hermann really _had_ looked terrible, but he did feel slightly guilty for not saying something like _don’t you think a bit of sugar water for slow rehydration will do_ when Hermann had sent him a desperate look. Whatever, he’d be fine in the end. There were probably a lot more urgent cases to attend to, not least of all the not-so-late Mister Beckett, and then Newt and Hermann could just sneak off quietly. Or just Newt. He wasn’t really clear on that yet.

There was an old breath mint in his pocket. Newt had spent the last five minutes debating whether he was hungry enough to eat it, despite the very present danger that it had been contaminated with something Kaiju-related in the past twenty-four hours. If a nurse or doctor didn’t show up within the next five minutes, he decided, he would eat it. If he died, it would be their fault.

So the drift had been every bit as terrible as he’d feared.

Newt was still afraid to go poking around his mind too much, because there were things of Hermann’s floating around in there, and every time he came across a piece of memory or a feeling that wasn’t his, he got a painful reminder of what Hermann might have received from _him_. Maybe Hermann wouldn’t look. He’d certainly seemed determined not to look in Newt’s direction during the drift, to the extent where things had turned around and Newt had almost felt insulted that Hermann didn’t want to know anything about him. But only almost. Guilty relief, as seemed the case too often in Newt’s life, had triumphed, in the end.

Newt’s brain still felt kind of raw, as if someone had cleaned the inside of his skull with bleach and then dumped his brain back in without rinsing. Technically, he knew that his headache was the combined effort of strained neck muscles and dehydration plus neural exertion, but he couldn’t help but feel like this was a drift hangover, plus intense morning after regret.

The drift had left Newt with the bitter aftertaste of the first four years of his acquaintance with Hermann. Back then, sharing his thoughts and feelings had seemed so easy, because he hadn’t yet come across something he might _not_ want to share with the man.

There was the sound of trainers in the hall outside, and then a nurse rounded the corner with a clipboard in her hand and her eyes fixed on Newt.

“Do you have anything to eat?” Newt asked her before she could get a word out. “I’m literally starving, I haven’t eaten since yesterday, I don’t think.”

That earned him a disapproving look that could have come straight from Hermann himself.

“That’s not healthy.”

“I know,” Newt said, “But I was kind of busy saving the world.”

The nurse sighed and fished a glucose tablet out of a drawer next to the bed. Newt cursed himself for not checking the drawer.

“It’s all I have for now. If you’re willing to wait a moment after your check-up, I’ll have someone bring you something. Or, if I clear you, you can go to the mess.”

After the twenty-something minutes Newt already spent for this very _routine_ , very _unnecessary_ check-up, he wasn’t too optimistic about food finding him in the medbay anytime soon.

“Thanks, but if you discharge me, I think I’ll take my chances in the mess.”

With any luck, he’d get some time to himself before Hermann found him to do something like talk about their feelings or whatever it was that Hermann was into these days. There were so many reasons why Newt didn’t want to talk about his feelings.

The nurse checked his pulse, his pupil reflexes, took his temperature and noted the results on her clipboard with a serious face. Newt found all of this a little bit exaggerated – sure, he’d been bleeding from his nose earlier today, or yesterday, but he wasn’t bleeding _now_ , and his headache was totally understandable considering the situation. He’d only been exposed to minimal amounts of radiation and Kaiju blue, so all in all, he’d managed this absolutely shit situation like a champ. He should consider going professional.

“As much as it pains me to say this, but you seem to be fine, Doctor Geiszler,” the nurse came to agree with him after some more minutes of intense staring at her clipboard, “I can’t clear you completely, but as long as you come back for another thorough check this week, you’re free to go for now.”

“Great.” Newt jumped off the bed, and found himself momentarily confused that his leg didn’t give away before he remembered that it wasn’t _him_ with the bad leg – muscle memory, powerful stuff, and probably the reason why Jaeger pilots were so good at adapting to each others’ fighting styles. Man, he should have drifted _years_ ago. The stuff it would have done for his research.

Except no. He shouldn’t have.

“Hey, you know the grumpy mathematician in room five? Gottlieb? Heavy German accent when he gets aggravated? _If ju will not lät me out of hier in zhe next five minutes I wisch to speak to jur supervisor?_ ”

Newt’s German accent skills were only marginally better than those of a villain in a Captain America movie. The nurse nodded hesitantly. “You know I’m not allowed to discuss confidential information regarding the patients…”

Newt made a sweeping gesture. “It’s cool. Just… I think he might be a bit more shaken than he lets on. Keep an eye on him, will you? I don’t think he’d admit to feeling terrible until he’s literally dying or something. It’s like they haven’t told him his health insurance is being taken care of by the PPDC. Germans are always so afraid of the US health care system.”

“We aren’t in the US,” the nurse reminded him.

“Right,” Newt replied, “Anyway, keep an eye on him. Maybe run a few extra checks, yeah?”

“I’ll… see what I can do,” the nurse said carefully.

“Great,” Newt said, giving her a thumbs-up.

\--

Newt, unfortunately, had only realised he had a crush on _Doktor_ Hermann Gottlieb after the man had already decided he hated Newt, and Newt had decided pretty much the same. Hermann had called Newt immature, shallow, and worse, _American_ , and Newt had called Hermann stuck-up and stuffy, and worse, _German_ , and that had been that. Newt couldn’t even remember if they’d started arguing about the correct sauce to order with fries or the proper attire for a scientific conference, but he remembered that this was how it had ended, and he remembered waiting for the guilty relief that accompanied the end of most relationships in his life that became too intimate for comfort.

Unfortunately, none of the kind happened.

Newt spent the next six weeks after the conference back at MIT, miserably checking his university email account and sending his grad students snappy replies when they asked him about their assignments. But no email from Hermann Gottlieb came his way, and he kept feeling miserable, and that was when he realised that while he still wanted no kind of sexual relationship whatsoever, he wanted _some_ kind of relationship, and he’d grown so used to Hermann in his life that his daily routine felt incomplete without at least one email from him. And not having Hermann to write to anymore, he realised that while he _was_ close to a lot of other people at MIT, the kind of things he’d shared with Hermann were things he wouldn’t tell any of _them_. It was sad to think that the only successful relationship of Newt’s life had ended before Newt had even realised that he was leading it.

In 2019, Newt turned thirty-one and joined the Pan-Pacific Defense Corps as the lead neurobiologist.

Hermann Gottlieb had joined one year earlier, as one of the pioneer scientists of the Jaeger program. Newt had seen his face on the news, in a cadre of scientists lined up in a group shot of the new team, and had tried not to think too hard of the kinds of things that would come Hermann’s way in the next years. He still felt a pang of regret every time he thought of Hermann, and he wondered if it was because Hermann was _the one that got away_ , so to speak, or because he’d fallen so terribly short of all of Newt’s expectations – too German, too rigid and adhering to authority, too unimpressed with Newt’s growing collection of tattoos or the way he spoke about the Kaiju in public, full of straight-up fascination. (As a kid, Newt had owned five T-Rex plushies. This was only like a million times cooler.)

Newt and Hermann couldn’t be defined as working alongside each other by a long shot, but they still managed to find enough common ground to disagree over a lot of things. Newt built himself a temple of Kaiju entrails and neuroscience with which Hermann took issue purely on principle. His approach saw no merit for the defence program in exploring the Kaiju, not least of all because he considered Newton entirely too fascinated with them. And Newt argued and called Hermann a theorist who needed to get his hands dirty for once, and waited quietly and patiently for his crush to go away.

It didn’t.

It didn’t, because the years seemed to grow longer and the funding grew scarce and Hermann and Newt were forced to work more and more closely together by necessity until they both only oversaw a department of three scientists, and then two, and then one, and then none. It didn’t, because Newt had to learn that Hermann had an impeccable work ethic and was generous with his time when someone needed something; it didn’t, because Newt discovered that Hermann found time to stream the _Tatort_ every Sunday night, or whenever it happened to be Sunday night in Germany and Hermann happened to be awake, his dedication to bad German crime dramas was truly breath-taking; it didn’t, because as the funding grew scarce, there were less and less people who truly believed science could still come up with a solution to this.

Until they only had each other to turn to, as it had been back in 2013.

\--

Newt disposed of his clothes in his lab, where he normally dumped contaminated personal protective equipment. He hoped that the nurse would buy him some time with Hermann, so he did a quick round through the lab to find his spare computer – where _had_ he left his other one, it wasn’t still on the dock, was it? – before sprinting back to his room in a lab coat and slippers. Though, to be fair, it was more of a tired jog. He didn’t really have the energy for sprinting anymore. That energy had gone into two consecutive Kaiju drifts and wow; he was never going to get tired of saying that.

The first thing he did in his room was to step into the tiny-ass shower and make the most of his five minutes of water time. Afterwards, he still felt slightly dirty, and also cold because the water in the Shatterdome perpetually hovered around twenty degrees, but at least the worst of the Kaiju entrails were now making their way down the Shatterdome sewage system. He gave his glasses a quick rinse and then jumped into his bed, laptop within arm’s reach.

It occurred to him that he was going to have to talk things out with Hermann.

Newt put on some music as he went to find food. There was a half eaten package of crackers on his desk and a bottle of grape juice in his fridge. He also found one cheese ball, leftover noodles he’d smuggled out of the mess the day before yesterday – they still smelled fine – and an apple in his fridge. He could make do with that.

Even if Hermann had made a minimal effort to look, Newt argued as he sat back down on his bed, there was no chance he hadn’t seen anything of Newt’s feelings for him, because as unfortunate as they were on their own, they also tended to be blaringly obvious and had, at the time, been kind of Newt’s primary concern. It was like that game where you weren’t supposed to think of an elephant. Yeah, Newt’s crush on Hermann was a giant elephant in the room. So he owed the man an explanation – something like ‘ _hey, so now that you know I’ve been harbouring a crush on you for the past years, I also want you to know that I totally respect you as a person and this isn’t going to change anything between us_ ’. Yeah, that should do it.

_Newton’s standing at a lab bench, hunched over and glasses pushed high on the bridge of his nose but he’s squinting because he never manages to get his prescription checked this stupid careless brilliant man he’s going to ruin his eyesight what is he thinking doesn’t he know there isn’t anybody else who can do the things he’s doing solve the riddles he’s solving be here the way he is here with me in these times who does he think he is._

Newt winced as he suddenly got a very sharp impression of a feeling that clearly wasn’t his, the otherness of the thought cutting like a sharp intrusion into the natural flow of his thoughts.

Drift hangover. Peachy.

He didn’t need glimpses into Hermann’s mind to know the man held him in some sort of esteem, they had, after all, conversed extensively on each others’ academic achievements. It was the interpersonal were they differed, and it was there their relationship had taken a turn for the worse. These short glimpses into Hermann’s mind were definitely not helping Newton – they just accentuated exactly what it was their incompatibility had ruined for him.

He always ended up ruining things.

He finished the last cracker, swiped the crumbs of his bed and got up to refill his empty grape juice bottle with tap water.

There was a knock on his door.

Newt eyed the door with due suspicion, because with the Marshall dead – the Marshall _dead_ , god, he still couldn’t quite process it – there was only one person this could realistically be, who, post-apocalypse, wouldn’t have anything better to do than pass by his room to check if he was there.

“Newton,” Hermann’s voice confirmed his suspicion, “Are you in there?”

This was literally the worst. And he said that, having just drifted twice with dead Kaiju tissue.

(Never getting tired of saying that.)

“Yeah,” he replied weakly, switching off his music. “Come in.”

Hermann opened the door hesitantly, with the mark of a man who had grown up in a society that valued privacy and personal space a little too much for Newton’s taste. Or, nope, that was not the reason for the slow door opening – it turned out that Hermann was carrying two trays of food precariously balanced on top of each other, while holding his cane in the other hand. How he had managed to get them from the mess to Newton’s room without spilling anything was beyond Newt.

It occurred to him that this might be a peace offering.

“Would you give me a hand here?” Hermann snapped, with the air of a man who was not bringing a peace offering. Newt released an anxious breath.

“I don’t know, man. Maybe you should tell me what’s for dinner first so I decide if I like it.”

A glare from Hermann told him that maybe this wasn’t the right time for jokes.

“Just kidding, I’m starving. Give it here.”

He got up and took the trays from Hermann, which then left him with the task of finding a place to put them on his overly loaded desk. He really should have cleaned his room last week, but on the other hand, there had been an apocalypse ongoing. He could be excused for the sad state of the little personal space he had. He settled on placing both of the tray on top of papers he was sure he wouldn’t need anymore now that the world wasn’t ending, and then busied himself with rearranging some of the other stuff so he wouldn’t have to turn around and face Hermann.

He could think of so many other things he’d rather do than face Hermann.

“They were rather reluctant to discharge me,” Hermann said into the silence that must seem even stranger to him than it seemed to Newton, since Newt was normally the one who couldn’t shut up. “Apparently, the nurses were under the impression that I was keeping some of my ailments from them.”

“That sucks, man,” Newt said hoarsely, then gave up on the hopeless task on his desk and turned around. Quick and sharp, like ripping off a band aid.

“So you’re all good?”

“As the circumstances allow. Are _you_ alright?”

There was some colour in Hermann’s cheeks again, most likely courtesy of the way he’d spent hauling two food trays that they were now both neglecting. Apart from that, Hermann still looked exhausted, shaky, and completely off.

“Peachy.” Newt grinned. “So, you want to eat or what?”

There was something about the way Hermann treaded that unsettled Newt. He realised that part of it was a hyperawareness, remainder of their drift, thought processes that had belonged to Hermann telling him exactly where the man was in the room right now. That would have come in handy during the first ten years of their acquaintance. Now, it just gave Newt the creeps.

“I…” Hermann looked like he had been about to say something else. “Yes, I would like that.”

Newt drew him a chair and Hermann tried to sit down with dignity but slumped down nevertheless, a cue that his leg was hurting. Newt passed him one of the trays, then sat down on his bed with the other.

Apparently, dinner was potatoes with unidentifiable vegetables that might have been carrots, and some meat that Newt pushed aside. Even if it weren’t mystery cafeteria meat, he probably wouldn’t eat it. Too many hours dissecting specimen in his biology lab had killed his taste for meat. It had occurred to him that he might as well be a vegetarian now.

Newt dug right in, because if anything the crackers had made him _more_ hungry. Hermann was more careful, first taking a few bites, apparently unsure if his stomach would support any food at the moment. Newton couldn’t blame him.

_Der Nachmittag seiner mündlichen Abiturprüfung, the afternoon of his finals, it’s warm outside to the point where it feels he’s becoming one with the chair he’s sitting on, die Lehrer haben ihn noch nicht hereingebeten aber die Tür wird jede Minute aufgehen, they’re going to call him in any minute now, he literally cannot do this, he’s going to throw up from test anxiety anytime now, he’s good at physics but not so good at literally anything else, god, why couldn’t they test him on that and math and let him go, er muss hier raus._

The old memory, interspersed with German, called up a borrowed nausea inside Newton. Apparently, Hermann had always had a nervous stomach. Newt cast a guilty look in the direction of Hermann, somehow feeling like he was intruding on the man’s mind even now. He was sure he wasn’t supposed to see, to feel, to think these things.

And what in god’s name was Hermann getting from _him_?

“I feel that, at some point, we should talk about our drift,” Hermann proposed into the silence between them. Newt stiffened.

“Yeah, probably.”

He couldn’t help but feel creeped out by the topical connection Hermann had just made between Newt’s thoughts and his proposition. Then again, it was probably a hot conversation topic right now.

“It was… intense. I never thought it would be so personal,” Hermann said, clearly choosing his words with a care Newt categorised as typical for him. It was as if even after over ten years abroad, Hermann was still afraid of people misconstruing his meaning when he was speaking a foreign language.

Newt wanted to say something, wanted to call up images of consciousness and EEGs showing harmonising brainwaves, because _of course_ it would be personal, the drift literally transgressed all borders between self and other and it was _fucking scary_ , Newt had spent a great part of his life cultivating his individuality and it all washed away under the oncoming wave of foreign consciousness. He hadn’t known _himself_ for the span of five odd minutes.

“Dude, tell me about it,” he said instead, because that was the safe alternative. “I mean, holy mother of alien clones.”

There was something about the way that Hermann only looked at Newton between carefully measured bites of his food, something that concerned him.

“Newton…”

“Listen, man.” Newton decided to shut Hermann down before this turned into something ugly. He was still too raw for this, too open, and Hermann was just _sitting_ here, he’d brought Newt _dinner_ , and whatever obligation he felt was probably not going to last. “I get it, we had a special five minutes back there and now you’re going to change your ways and we’ll be best friends forever and move to Munich and you’ll read me von Humboldt and I’ll read you Büchner. I’m just saying it’s fine. You don’t have to behave differently because you shared my brain for five minutes. Or I yours. We’re good.”

Hermann stilled, the hand with his fork hovering between his plate and his mouth. “Oh. Alright.”

Newton raked a hand through his hair. “I just mean… I don’t want pity. I don’t want us to run around like the Wei triplings, crazy in synch or something. I know that people can still drift and not want the same things or be super attached. You’re not obligated to do anything here.”

This was pathetic, Newt decided. He was pathetic.

“Newton,” Hermann said carefully, “I have not drifted with you out of a sense of obligation. I have done it because I _care_ about you, and I would be sorry to see you _die_.”

Newt’s palms felt sweaty. He couldn’t meet Hermann’s eye. He wanted to look up and tell him _thank you_ and _I feel the same way_ but there was no way he couldn’t. Too close; too soon.

“I don’t think I would have died,” Newton countered, his tone just a little bit too testy to fit the conciliar mood. That was good. That was what he was going for. “I mean, I made it the first time.”

“Are you deliberately missing the point, Newton, because I--”

“The point is, that my model was correct and you’re just pissed to admit that my drift saved the world. I mean, the most you did was predict the world’s expiration date.”

It was almost too easy to rile up Hermann now, Newt realised. True compatibility meant knowing each others buttons a little too well. And Hermann fell for it.

“Have you conveniently forgotten that the plan that shut the breach was _mine_ , you absolute--”

“Yes, and it was a wonderful plan except for the part where _it wouldn’t have worked_ without my--”

“I’ll thank you not to equate your self-sacrifice with genuine scientific exploration, your work ethic is questionable at best and your risk-assessment--”

“Out of the two of us, who has read _Das Abgrenzungsproblem_ five times in the last six months? You idolize the idea of brave scientific exploration in theory, but your practise is grey and--”

“What are we doing, Newton.”

Hermann’s question that wasn’t a question carried a sense of resignation. Newt deflated and shrunk back over his tray, suddenly devoid of energy. Hermann refused to meet his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” Newt said eventually. “I just--”

Nope, he still couldn’t say it.

“I’m sorry.”

Hermann sighed. “It’s alright, I suppose. You said it yourself. Not all pilots come out of the drift as a harmonious whole.”

He seemed more crestfallen about this than Newt felt he had the right to be. After all, they’d gotten along as an arguing mess for pretty much the last ten years. Hermann had no right to be upset about that _now_.

Newt found he suddenly wasn’t hungry anymore.

“Do you also…” Newt had to clear his throat. “It’s weird, I keep getting these… impressions, of memories from you I think. They’re not really specific but super intense.”

Hermann nodded, still not looking at Newt.

“Yes, I, ah… I have been getting those as well,” he admitted, “Though I hope they’re a passing phenomenon. It’s rather unsettling to be walking down a hallway and suddenly be bombarded with memories of your childhood infatuation with Ralph from _Wissen Macht Ah_.”

There were low blows, and then there was reminding people of their childhood crushes on TV scientists. Newt’s ears turned a little red.

“Of all the things you had to pick up…” he muttered.

Strangely, Hermann also turned red.

“Yes.” He pursed his lips. “I suppose we both would have chosen quite differently had we been allowed a choice in what to share. May I ask…?”

“You want to know what I got from you?” Newt shrugged. “Some stuff from your finals in high school. You really are terrible with public speaking, aren’t you?”

Hermann turned a shade of deeper red. “Did you… was the history or the Latin final?”

Newt frowned.

“History,” he decided.

“ _Oh Gott_.”

Hermann was _mortified_. This somewhat lifted Newt’s spirits, if only because it meant that even if his most personal secrets had been revealed, he’d get to torment Hermann right back. Still, it was only a small consolation.

“Hey, man, it’s cool.” Newt leaned forward, trying to catch Hermann’s eye. “Now that we have all the dirt on each other, maybe we’ll have to be extra friendly after all.”

 “I can recall very little of it actively, though,” Hermann consoled him, “Maybe it will pass. Maybe it passes faster if we leave the memories alone.”

“You are just afraid I’m going to find something super embarrassing. What, did you get super drunk at prom and tried to flirt with your math teacher? Did you have a _hot_ math teacher?”

Newt was a little bit delighted by the prospect of finding what it was that made Hermann so embarrassed, until he remembered his own secret hopefully slumbering safely away somewhere in Hermann’s mind. He stilled.

“I mean, not that it matters. You’re right. We should probably leave it alone. Frankly, I can do without suddenly knowing about your whole life. I am happier with my delusions about Berlin as a hipster enclave in the middle of Europe.”

“It’s really not that gr--” Hermann began, but Newt shushed him.

“No, we’re not doing that right now. You’re going to finish your food, I’m going to sit here and watch you, and then you’re going to bed. You look terrible, man.”

It felt almost _too_ easy. It was like something had clicked in his mind about Hermann – he could anticipate and defuse the man’s protests, it was _so useful_. And so efficient. And so completely terrifying and wrong. He was ethically conflicted but delighted.

Instead of doing as Newt had told him, however, Hermann set his tray aside and got up to sit next to Newt on the bed. There, he finally met Newton’s eyes, and there was something in them that told Newt to either lean in or run away.

“Newton, I just wanted to say--”

Strangely, it wasn’t Newt but Hermann who cut himself off. Instead, he wrapped both his arms around Newt and pulled him in. Newt screwed his eyes shut and focussed on breathing. He was _not_ going to start crying. He was not going to start crying just because he was tired and miserable and Hermann was there and shaking a little bit, just like Newton; he was not going to start crying just because Hermann radiated a dry warmth and Newt could feel the rhythm of his breathing, nope, he was _fine_.

“Cool, man,” Newt forced out between clenched teeth, “I get it.”

Hermann let go, a little embarrassed. “I should…”

“Yes,” Newt agreed, “Yes, probably.”

He had a feeling they were talking about different things entirely. Half-finished sentences hung in the air, a conversation interrupted.

“You know that I…” Hermann trailed off. “Goodnight, Newton.”

\--

Newt woke with the distinct feeling he was suffocating.

This disturbed him on several levels – he recalled asthmatic attacks from his childhood enough that the feeling of breathlessness didn’t scare him, but they weren’t _his_ memories, and there was something about the pillows and blankets he was lying in that mimicked the sensation of drowning. A blue-hued shadow hung over his consciousness and was reflected in the poor lighting of his room, and then he was out of bed before he really knew what he was doing.

The concrete floor was cold under his bare feet.

He stared back at his bed as though it was something that might physically harm him, and then exited his room and padded down the corridor on the strange impulse of having to move _somewhere_. The eerie quiet of the Shatterdome barely registered as he trailed down corridors on instinct alone. He rubbed his chest. He still half felt as though he was suffocating.

His lab space was dark save for the status lights of a few of his instruments he’d forgotten to shut down in his mad rush to save the world. There would be time for that tomorrow, or the day after, he decided. He’d clean out this whole lab, box his Kaiju specimen to somewhere he wouldn’t have to look at them for a long time and write a really long essay on why he, Newton Geiszler, was a total badass.

Tonight, he would re-learn how to breathe, though.

He slumped down with the back to his centre lab bench, rested his head against the stone and tried to focus. His chest felt like it had been battered in with a sledgehammer, and he hoped to got it was Hermann’s childhood asthma that had his body confused, because the alternative would be death by strangling. He could do without that particular memory from a very dead baby Kaiju.

Why didn’t he think of that _before_ he drifted? Because of the world-saving, right.

Muscle memory, man. It was just a thing that didn’t stop. Next thing you know he was going to start slithering over the lab floor like an amphibious nightmare Kaiju.

“Hello?”

The sudden voice had Newt jump from where he’d been calmly leaning against his lab bench, heart pumping and chest aching with renewed shortness of breath.

“Fucking hell!” Newt called.

“Oh, it’s you,” the voice said, and now Newt recognised Hermann too, it was definitely his colleague and pain-in-the-ass of a scientist who took pleasure in scaring Newt half to death while he made a night-visit to the lab.

“What are you doing here?”

There was a small mattress wedged into a corner of the lab. It was half hidden behind the blackboards, and a little bit dusted with chalk, but science needed its nap time as well and sometimes the way to one’s room was quite a walk when there was world-saving to be done. Newt spotted Hermann on that same mattress, dark shadows under his eyes and a hand steadily rubbing his chest just as Newt had done not a minute earlier.

Hermann made a sour face and dropped his hand. “I could ask you the same question.”

Newt shrugged, embarrassed that he’d let himself be scared so easily.

“Nightmare.”

The twitch at the corner of Hermann’s mouth said it all.

“Would you…” Newt eyed the spot on the mattress next to Hermann, hated himself for saying it, hated himself for feeling alone. “Would you mind the company?”

Newt tried not to read anything into the relief that showed on Hermann’s face. They’d had a long day, and if he wanted to crawl into bed or whatever it was you could call a shitty mattress on a cold lab floor with his colleague that was his business. He could always deal with being rejected or having to reject someone in the morning. But he couldn’t deny himself the luxury of comfort right now.

“Please,” Hermann said and moved over to make space for Newt. Newt crawled in right away, finding the covers still a bit chilly but Hermann unfairly warm. He buried his face in the pillow.

Hermann, ever-so-tactful, laid a hand on his shoulder, so gently it could almost be considered a question. Newt inched closer just that bit.

They stayed like this for a while, then Hermann sighed and wrapped his arm around Newt, and Newt released a breath. He felt like crying again, and wondered why it was always close proximity to Hermann that did it for him – of all the things he could have chosen, including but not limited to sad movies about dogs, science as heroism, arctic explorers, or the ending of Star Wars Episode V. No, it had to be his stupid colleague and nemesis of several years that made him feel like he could finally let go.

But he was not going to. Let go. Because that entailed crying and he was not going to inflict this on Hermann. Because Newt, contrary to popular belief, could keep himself together.

He did move closer to Hermann, though, and tucked his head under Hermann’s chin, which might be a little weird if they wanted to brush this off as just a cuddle between scared and exhausted scientists in the morning, but at least like this he wasn’t going to have to look Hermann in the face and confront any of the things that might be going on there.

Hermann moved obligingly.

\--

The next morning was strange, quiet and unsettling.

Newt woke from Hermann trying to get off the mattress without disturbing him, which worked about as well as one would expect, and then Hermann apologised and Newt tried not to meet his eyes. Post-drift-and-nightly-cuddle-morning-after-regret-and-hangover. His emotions re: Hermann were getting more and more complex.

Newt excused himself to take a shower, and when entering his room, found out that apparently they had been summoned to a debrief twenty minutes ago. By which he meant to say that the debrief had started twenty minutes ago.

Newt wasn’t particularly fond of the idea of a debrief, mostly because it meant dragging up all kinds of unpleasant memories from yesterday. Then again, this might be the last debrief he’d ever have to attend, maybe he could quit right here on the spot and move back to Boston, or some other town that was totally in right now. Maybe he could finally check out Berlin. Maybe he’d move to Mallorca.

Hermann had probably heard of the debrief around the same time as Newt, but Newt still passed by his room, just in case he hadn’t. Nobody answered the door, so Newt assumed Hermann had either gone back to his room to continue sleeping, or he was already at the debrief.

He was already at the debrief.

Newt was unsettled that, now that Pentecost was dead, the command hadn’t automatically been ceased to Herc Hansen, but apparently, that’s how things went in the PPDC now. They’d had their unsupervised fun, and now the government was back to telling them just exactly _how_ they should pick their noses.

Hansen was seated at the head of the table in the conference room, a place that Newt associated with the Marshall so strongly that he had to stop in the doorway for a moment to compose himself. He didn’t do well with loss. He never had.

And now the entire Shatterdome was a memorial to dead pilots. Newt _had_ to get out of here.

“Doctor Geiszler. Please have a seat.”

No mention of the fact that Newt was twenty minutes late to the debrief. That either meant he was still cutting them some slack, post-apocalypse-wise, or that he had something much more important on his mind. Newt decided to sit quietly, and to wait and see.

“Good job on the last-minute world-saving discovery, both of you.” Hansen nodded gravely, eyeing first Hermann and then Newton. Even with his arm in a sling, he looked half ready to punch someone, if needed with his non-dominant arm. “Care to fill me in on what went down there?”

Newt and Hermann exchanged a look.

“Well,” Newt said, at the same time Hermann said, “You see.”

Maybe they should have talked about this beforehand. Newt kind of wanted to give Hansen his abbreviated and slightly awesome-ized story, but he had the feeling that Hermann wouldn’t let him. There was a bit of eyebrow-raising and intense nodding between them as they tried to nonverbally settle on who would speak first. Hermann won, but only because he gave Newt a stern gaze, then covered Newt’s hand on the table with his own in a gesture that was meant to look reassuring but completely derailed Newt, and then turned to Hansen.

Newt would have rolled his eyes, because at this point, everybody and their mom must have figured out that they’d drifted. He didn’t like the thought of everybody knowing.

“Following Marshall Pentecost’s orders, Doctor Geiszler located an intact Kaiju brain to repeat his experiment from 0500 hours yesterday. I assisted him, which lead to the discovery that the breach acted as a genetic barcode scanner. We then made our way back to the Shatterdome to inform the Jaeger team of our discovery as fast as possible,” Hermann said curtly.

Newt wanted to protest. This was vague, and a terribly short version of what had happened.

“The ‘experiment’ Doctor Geiszler had performed being a drift with Kaiju tissue, correct?” Hansen asked.

Hermann’s hand around Newt’s tightened. Newt looked at the intertwined hands like neither of them belonged to his body.

“A ‘drift’ implies a minimum of compatibility Marshall,” Hermann said, “So I would not use this word to describe the exploits of Doctor Geiszler and me.”

“And _you_?” the Marshall asked.

“Yes,” Hermann said, leaving that one up for interpretation. Newt was kind of amazed, and kind of jealous of how well Hermann could sweet-talk authority when he wanted to. Why hadn’t he gotten them the funding for a Jacuzzi in the lab years ago? Did he learn _this_ at university in Germany?

Hansen closed his eyes for a moment.

“Well, I can’t say I’m surprised,” he said, “I’m just glad it worked, and you two didn’t kill yourself.”

Newt glanced at Hermann, who was frowning deeply. That was it? Acceptance, a pat on the back? Then again, Pentecost had been in close contact with Hansen about his plans. Maybe Hansen was cool with all of it, without questioning their sanity after drifting with aliens too much. Which, in turn, made Newt question Hansen’s sanity.

“Sir…” Newt said hesitantly, “Does that mean we’re free to go?”

Hansen closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Newt felt his stomach muscles constricting. That expression rarely meant anything good.

“Not quite. I have… I’ve been told to…”

He pinched the bridge of his nose.

“I’ve been told to recruit you both for an additional service time of five years. You’re the most competent Kaiju scientists we have, you see--”

“Because we’re the only ones you kept paying,” Hermann interjected.

“Yes,” Hansen agreed, “But I’ve been told that you agreeing to the commitment would get you both a raise and significant benefits in health insurance and retirement provisions.”

Hermann and Newt simultaneously let out a barking laugh. Hansen gave them a disapproving look, but it wasn’t like they’d practised it. Well, they’d practised it once.

“I was not aware there was funding for such a project,” Hermann said sourly.

Newt didn’t want to stay in the PPDC for the next five years. He didn’t want to stay for the next five _minutes_. Jesus, the Marshall was _dead_ , the Kaidanovskys were _dead_. The Wei triplets were dead. There _was_ almost no PPDC left to speak of anymore, as far as he was concerned.

“We could go anywhere in the world now,” Newt said abruptly, and it was neither bragging nor a bargaining technique. He liked to believe he was just reassuring himself. “Why on earth would we want to stay here? I’m sure if I asked the heads of Europe’s major universities to have a wrestling match about who gets us, they’d _do_ it.”

It surprised him to see that Hermann was stifling a laugh. Normally, this kind of colourful language was exactly what had Hermann snorting and calling Newton _unfit for an academic environment_. Apparently, Hermann had discovered his sense of humour in the drift.

Hansen didn’t seem too put off by the pair’s reaction, and Newt was still confused by the death grip Hermann had on his hand. All in all, as weird days went, this was one of the weirdest in his life, Newt was sure of that. Certainly not the kind of day you would pick to make big life decisions.

“Look,” Hansen said, “I can understand you want out. You’ve done more for the PPDC and the world than anybody could have asked of you. We all have. But the military and the bureaucrats are going to come swooping down on us in a matter of weeks, maybe days. If you want out, you’ll want to do it _now_.”

He gave them a meaningful look. Newt looked down on his and Hermann’s entangled hands. His stomach sank.

“What about Miss Mori?” Newt asked, “And Mister Beckett?”

“To my information, Miss Mori has accepted a research position at Tokyo university. And Mister Beckett has made arrangements to move in with her.”

Another happy drift couple. Newt couldn’t help it, he had to pull his hand away from Hermann and get up.

“I’ll think about it,” he said, and left before Hermann could say something clever or before Hansen demanded an immediate decision.

\--

While Hermann was still busy, Newt made his way back to the lab to grab his personal protective equipment and then went out in search of Kaiju entrails.

In the beginning, the PPDC had strictly monitored Kaiju clean-ups, especially after the effects of Kaiju Blue had been discovered and researched thoroughly. There had been professionals on-scene, equipped with a range of contact precautions and Kaiju-o-metres measuring exposure to toxic substances for the workers present. But then defunding had struck its cruel and uncaring blow, and nowadays the clean-ups were left to a mixture of fanatics, businessmen like Chau, and the unfortunate locals who wanted to see their city clean and somewhat restored again. PPDC monitoring was limited to one or two onsite coordinators, who mainly made sure that no protective equipment was stolen. Oxygen bottles were expensive, after all.

Newt got onsite just fine by waving his PPDC-issued ID card and pointing out that he was, after all, wearing a Tyvek suit and a face mask, as per regulation. He didn’t point out that he’d clambered up a Kaiju with far less contact precautions just yesterday, as that was the sort of thing that might still get one banned from onsite clean-up. They let him in just fine.

The aftermath of the Kaiju attack on Hong Kong was the ideal place for Newt to hide from all his problems. There were people everywhere, and everyone was wearing goggles and a face mask, plus full-body coveralls. He was as good as invisible.

Kaiju clean-up used to be an exact science, back when there was still a lot of science being done with the leftover parts. Nowadays, it was just a scramble for the best parts. Newt hadn’t come here with the intention to score parts, he’d come here to splash around dangerous and toxic fluids and dissemble tissue with blunt knives. Aggressive? He? Never.

He knew he was avoiding some kind of confrontation with Hermann, but what unnerved him was that he didn’t know what kind of confrontation it would be. A kind rebuttal from Hermann? Worse, an offer at a relationship? Newt couldn’t go on in this hellscape between yes and no, but he also didn’t want to confront the things ahead of him.

Onsite, Newt spotted tents of at least three rival organisations, hastily set up in the aftermath of the attack, where people like Chau organised their men. He did not actually spot Chau’s people, for which he was grateful. He wasn’t sure how they were going to respond to seeing Newt alive and kicking while their boss wasn’t.

Newt followed a bunch of people in Tyvek suits from the first tent to their clean-up site. There was a woman with the PPDC-logo on her chest handing out equipment and making people sign for it, so Newt drew his face-mask a bit higher and mumbled something in a French accent he’d picked up from a friend at MIT. Well, a friend.

In the beginning, not the very beginning but the Jaeger-beginning, when Kaiju-corpses had first begun to resemble something worth salvaging, after the bombs, they had started consulting specialists from all over. Toxic waste removal people, the people who clean up after nuclear accidents, the people who remove whale cadavers from beaches, deep-sea biologists (which Newt thought was a totally rad job, if he wasn’t into neurobiology that much he would have totally gone into marine biology), morticians, you get the idea. It turned out that there wasn’t a lot that could cut through Kaiju tissue, the skin alone was thicker than that of most earth mammals, and the bone structure was unbelievably stable (there was, after all, a reason why people had begun to build houses into the leftover skeletons). There had been whole think tanks devoted to figuring out how to best break down a Kaiju corpse and keep the contamination of the surrounding areas to a minimum.

Newt had worked his share of Kaiju removal sites in his time, so when the crew he’d tagged along with figured out he knew his way around a Kaiju more than just passably well, they left him to his own part of Leatherback to dissemble. Newt had to hand it to Mako and Raleigh, they really were _thorough_. And by thorough, he meant that they left behind nothing worth mailing home. Leatherback was a complete mess of toxic substances and tissue in various stages of decomposition.

He couldn’t exactly tell how much time he spent slicing tissue into handy slices, cracking through bones, bagging skin lice and mopping up Kaiju Blue, but it must have been quite some time. It got unbelievably hot in Tyvek suits, one of their many disadvantages, and the air behind Newt’s filter mask tasted stale and body warm. His eyes itched, but he couldn’t wipe them for fear of contamination. He just kept working through it. Eventually, he’d make his way back to the Shatterdome and face his problems. Ideally, when he came back, his problems would have solved themselves. Maybe Hermann would have stopped smiling like he did, and Newt’s heart would stop splitting in half every time he saw it. Maybe when Newt returned to the Shatterdome, there’d be a job offer from Stanford or MIT or the HU Berlin (which would just be ironic, because Newt was ninety-nine percent sure that Hermann would return to the TU and then they’d practically be university neighbours and none of Newt’s problems would be solved).

Except that was probably not how things were going to go.

“Geiszler!”

Newton turned around to find a five-foot tall woman in full protective equipment stomping towards him. He recognised her as the PPDC liaison who had been monitoring onsite personnel earlier, and now he realised the disadvantage of coveralls: he might be less recognisable, but people were also less recognisable to him. Otherwise, he would have realised the woman in the Tyvek suit was Carola, the Italian who worked as a first responder after Kaiju attacks in the Hong Kong Shatterdome.

Of course she had recognised him.

“There’s someone waiting to talk to you outside of the hot zone. Lose the coverall and follow me for a minute.”

“Can’t a guy hack up Kaiju parts in peace anywhere around here?” Newt complained, but he ditched the saw he was holding and wiped his gloved hands on his suit pants.

“You can get back to your questionable hobbies when you’ve done your talking. You look like you could use a break,” Carola responded. A few of her salt-and-pepper curls were sticking out from under her hood. Newt didn’t know her really well, but he knew that the other first responders loved and feared her, so he thought it best to comply.

“Alright.”

He followed Carola to a decontamination station that had been hastily set up in a tent a few streets away. He peeled off his suit, lost the gloves, and kicked the boots into a corner where hopefully somebody would pick them up for decontamination. Then, barefooted and clad only in a t-shirt and sweatpants, he padded out the other side of the decon station. He’d left his change of clothes on the other side of the clean-up site. Oh well.

On the other side of the decon station, cane gripped tightly in his hand, Hermann stood and tapped his foot on the ground in a show of irritation. It was Newt’s luck he saw him first, that way he had time to sculpt his face into something contained and neutral.

“Hey,” he said, hesitating, waiting, hands hovering at his side.

Hermann, at first, said nothing. He turned, so as to face Newt, and then stared at him, with what was clear exasperation on his face.

“So you’re still in one piece,” he commented, finally, after Newt had begun to wonder if Hermann was just here to show his disapproval nonverbally and then leave again.

“Are you questioning my skills with a saw?” Newt asked, although he knew very well what Hermann meant because his drift hangover was feeding him a constant stream of _worry-unease-how-can-he-keep-doing-this-I-am-going-to-kill-him-myself-if-his-disregard-for-equipment-safety-does-not-do-it-for-him_. It made him second hand nauseous, and wow, he’d had no idea that this was how Hermann felt every time he saw Newt handle equipment unsafely. What an exhausting life this man must have lead.

“I went to find you after the meeting with Hansen. You were not there anymore. No one had seen you.”

Hermann moved forward a few careful paces, and Newt wanted to back off. He didn’t want Hermann’s concern; he didn’t need it. What he needed was space, and some time to think.

“I’m sorry,” Newt said, which was the closest he’d come to being honest with Hermann since their drift.

Hermann looked at him and sighed. His shoulders sagged, and suddenly he looked very tired.

“Let’s go home, Newton.”

\--

They were sitting on Hermann’s bed, legs crossed and eyes fixed on the spot between them where they weren’t quite touching. Neither of them wanted to be the one to speak first.

It occurred to Newt that they hadn’t done much talking since their drift. The silence between them had morphed from something elated into something quiet, exhausted, morphed into something tense, and then into something resigned. Now they were out of reasons to avoid each other.

Newton raised one of his hands to run through his hair. Hermann cleared his throat. Then Newt dropped his hand, and silence fell again between them.

Newt risked a glance at Hermann’s face, from the corner of his eye. He hadn’t noticed how pronounced the shadows under Hermann’s eyes still were, despite the world not ending anymore, and Newt had enough post-drift awareness left to know that he himself had some part in that. Hermann was always the one to constantly worry about Newt, and how had he not seen this before? How had he ever read Hermann’s concern as disapproval?

“I would like to apologise for causing you discomfort,” Hermann said into the silence. He swallowed, then, and still refused to meet Newt’s eyes.

Wait… what?

“I…” Newt didn’t even know where to begin. Everything was so quiet suddenly, but Hermann was still here. Somehow, some part of Newt had always believed that they’d go down blazingly together at the end of the world, or drift apart quietly if the world didn’t end. He’d resigned himself to no more conversations, to embarrassment over having seen each other at their worst, to a partnership buried with the last of the Kaiju.

“No, _I’m_ sorry,” he said, leaning forward slightly in the hope of catching Hermann’s eye. He’d said it before, but it was true, he just had to explain _why_. “I never should have let you join me in that second drift, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to – I’m _sorry_ …”

“Stop apologising,” Hermann snapped, “Stop apologising and _listen_ to me.”

His hand twitched, and for a second Newt thought Hermann had been reaching for his hand.

“Sorry.”

Newt clamped a hand over his mouth when he realised what he’d said. By all the Jaegers, he was going to die here and now. On Hermann’s bed. As if he hadn’t inconvenienced the man enough.

“You have failed, at every opportunity that presented itself to you, to communicate in the appropriate manner,” Hermann said.

Newt took a minute to unpack that sentence. “Are you calling me an idiot?”

The corner of Hermann’s mouth curved upwards for a split second. “I’m calling you a little dense, maybe.”

Newt’s guts were still twisted into a sailor’s knot of anxiety and the fear of rejection, but he couldn’t help letting out a little shaky laugh.

“You still seem to assume that you lured me into that drift under false pretences. I’m telling you that’s just plain not true.”

Hermann’s voice was calm, moving forward steadily towards the point he was making, but Newt couldn’t help skipping ahead and jumping to conclusions.

“I already told you, Hermann, I’m sorry for what you saw, or what you think you saw, and if there’s anything I can do--”

Once again, Hermann didn’t let Newt finish his sentence.

“You were not forcing my hand by entering a drift with me, and you are serving no one by trying to hide an infatuation that, had you had the good sense to _look_ while we were drifting, you would have realised was entirely _mutual_ ,” he said, an angry blush covering his cheeks.

The knot in Newt’s stomach released, and his throat closed up.

“Oh,” Newt said, “ _Oh_.”

Hermann glanced at Newt shyly, his hands intertwined and his knuckles white. Newt didn’t know what to do. He’d never planned for this. He’d been safe in his bubble of unrequited affection. There were no rules for this in the romance book of Newton Geiszler. He was in unchartered territory.

All he knew was that he didn’t want to lose Hermann.

Shit, _Hermann_. Who was sitting on his bed right opposite of Newt, confessing his feelings in the most stuck-up, awkward German-constructed sentences manner and was probably expecting Newt to _react_. He couldn’t react. He was barely managing to breathe right now.

He’d been so wrong. Rejection would have been kinder than this. Rejection would have had Hermann quietly offering him to stay friends and then slipping out of his life piece by fucking piece but this – how could Newt ever begin to explain the gigantic fucking mess that was dating Newton Geiszler?

“Newton…” Hermann looked like he was about to say something and then changed his mind. “Are you alright?”

“I’m… fine, yes.” Newt ran a hand over his face. “I just think I might… Kaiju contamination… might have strained myself working that clean-up site today…”

“Oh.” Hermann leaned backwards, thrown off by the clear rebuttal. “Oh, alright. I suppose you should better get that checked out. Do you want me to bring you to the infirmary?”

Newt stumbled from the bed hastily. “No, I’m fine. I just… need to go.”

Hermann’s shoulders dropped. Newt knew he was saying all the wrong things, and that maybe he wouldn’t be given time to make up for all of them before they all left Hong Kong for somewhere else. Maybe he’d regret this down the road. But right now, he just couldn’t look Hermann Gottlieb in the face and tell the man that which he already knew, namely that Newton Geiszler was in love with him, and also asexual.

There was a choice here. Newt decided not to choose. He exited, heading not for the med bay but straight for his room.

\--

Newt woke with a headache, to the sound of someone relentlessly banging on his door.

He’d barely had the energy to change his clothes yesterday. There had been no thinking of taking a shower, or doing anything with his hair – which probably explained the look Tendo Choi gave him when Newt opened the door after falling out of bed first.

“What crawled onto your head and died there?” Choi asked with reference to Newt’s hair, letting himself into the room. Newt watched him pass, blinking slowly to get the sleep out of his eyes. There was a bitter taste in his mouth. Thinking back, he probably hadn’t brushed his teeth yesterday either.

Choi was looking around Newt’s room. Newt had never been one for being self-conscious over the state of his room, mostly because he had the chaos under control, but even he had to admit that he’d let himself go the past few days. He scratched his head and opted for an apologetic grin when Tendo turned back to him.

“Haven’t seen you much since D-Day. Good job you and the German did with the science there,” he said.

Somehow, most of the Shatterdome had never quite grasped that Newt had been born in Berlin. Hermann was _the German_ , Newt was _the Kaiju groupie_ , that was how people referred to them when talking to someone who didn’t know their names. The only time anybody had ever called Newt _German_ had been that one time when he’d actually eaten the _Sauerkraut_ served in the mess, which must have been in Tokyo in – oh – 2020? 2021? The years had started blending into each other at some point.

“I was busy,” Newt said, “Sorry.”

“’S alright,” Choi said, waving a hand dismissively and flopping down on Newt’s desk chair. Newt opted to sit down on his bed, since Tendo seemed to settle in for a longer visit.

“How’ve you been?” Tendo asked, pointedly ignoring the half-finished dinner on Newt’s desk. It was still there from Hermann’s visit after their drift.

“You know how it is.” Newt tried to make his grin as convincing as possible, but got the feeling he hadn’t quite succeeded. “Everybody wants a piece of you once you’ve saved the world. Barely had time for anything.”

“Right.” Tendo nodded. “Yeah, I can imagine. You’d think things would settle down once the Kaiju are not attacking every five minutes, but they don’t. Settle down, I mean.”

Newt, still in a particularly grim mood because of the uncertainty of the situation with Hermann, agreed. “They never do.”

“You must be happy now though. So much new material to work with,” Choi said. Newt understood his concern well enough – _why the hell are you not in your lab right now geeking out over new specimen?_ Apparently, when he wasn’t his usual energetic self, it freaked people out, whether they’d known him all his life or just for the most agonising, defining five years of his life.

“Everything is kind of at a standstill right now,” Newt said, “And also, three out of three Kaiju of the final confrontation were killed at the bottom of the Pacific, and are also highly radioactive blubber at the moment. I don’t think they’re really salvageable.”

Tendo snorted. “I’d swear off seafood for a while.”

“So would I,” said Newt. Seafood had become a rarity anyway, what with Kaiju-blue induced mutations creeping into non-pacific species as well. He’d read some papers on it a while back, and sworn he’d do some research himself if he found the time. Maybe he could do that now. Maybe he could do a lot of things.

Choi clapped his hands together. “Newt, I’ve always liked you.”

That kind of sentence was rarely ever followed by a positive statement. Newt eyed Tendo warily.

“You’re a crazy, Kaiju-obsessed fanboy. But I can respect that.” Tendo pursed his lips. “So I thought I’d give you a little heads-up. For old times’ sake. Technically, even I’m not supposed to know yet, but, well, they needed some office clerk to get the ball rolling, and I was the lucky bastard…”

“What is it, Tendo,” Newt interjected, “Just spit it out, come on…”

Choi sighed.

“They’re closing down Hong Kong Shatterdome by the end of this week.”

Tendo leaned back in Newt’s chair, running two hands over his face. The exhaustion sat deep in all of them, and events just kept happening. Newt felt his stomach drop.

“They want affairs settled as fast as possible now, and retain most of the original personnel. They’re hoping, if they push this through quickly enough, that most people won’t yet have another job prospect and will just sign on for another tour.”

“Mako’s gone already,” Newt said, remembering what Hansen had told him.

“Yeah, and that pissed them off big time. They’re going to do their worst to prevent other… _assets_ from slipping through their fingers.”

He gave Newt a pointed look.

It dawned on Newt, then.

“You mean me,” he said, and, remembering belatedly, he added, “And Hermann.”

Choi frowned deeply. He appeared as unhappy with the situation as Newt felt, and Newt suddenly realised he’d seen the same conflict on Hansen’s face. So Hansen had been trying to warn him – and Hermann – as well. Newt cursed himself for not using his time better.

“You’re one of the employees they’d rather not be losing.” Choi shrugged. “But hey, what’s five more years. Who knows what the PPDC will turn into now. I’ve heard talks of selling the research division to a private weapons contractor. Maybe the UN will disband the Corps and put the pilots back under military supervision.”

Newt’s stomach churned. It was too early in the morning for this.

“What are you going to do?” he asked Choi.

Tendo smiled bleakly.

“I’ve got a spot carved out for me at a robotics company in Silicon Valley. They make ‘bots to support the elderly and disabled people.”

“You got that job in the span of two _days_?” Newt asked, incredulously.

“No.” Tendo shook his head. “I’ve had that plan ready for a while.”

“In case of… what?”

Newt didn’t understand.

Tendo shook his head again, this time pensively.

“Some time ago, things were looking really bleak to me, and I began to wonder what I was doing all this for. It felt like there was no point to it, that we’d all die screaming anyway. But you can’t think like that and drag yourself out of bed every morning. So I asked myself – if I wasn’t doing this, what would I want to be doing? And then I applied. Well, I asked the company if they’d ever have a spot for an ex-employee of the PPDC when we’d managed to save the world. They told me not to worry, that they’d keep my seat warm. It was a reminder for me that there was something else out there. And it came in handy now.”

Newt swallowed. He didn’t know what to say. Tendo was kneading his hands together.

“All I’m saying is, Newt, think about it. And get out while you still can, before they hand you down to the US military with the rest of the equipment. You’re a _scientist_ , right? Find yourself a nice quiet lab away from all this mess and dissect your specimen there.”

He clapped his hands together and got up. From there, he gave Newt a long look.

“This might be goodbye for now. I’m leaving the day after tomorrow.”

Newt, startled, got up as well and bypassed the hand Choi had extended towards him in favour of engulfing him in a hug. They’d spent the better part of the last years working together to prevent the end of the world. It seemed unthinkable that they wouldn’t see each other anymore now.

“Take care, Tendo,” Newt said, and the words were suddenly hard to say around the burning sensation of sadness closing up his throat. “And thank you. For everything.”

Tendo gave him a fierce pat on the back, then stepped back and away. His eyes were shining with tears as well. Newt had never taken him for the type to cry easily, but then again they’d all seen a lot together. They were probably long past false male pride and pretences by now.

“I’ll see you again, Geiszler,” Choi said, stabbing a finger in Newt’s direction, “I’m going to make a shit-ton of money and visit the shit out of you.”

Newt let out a laugh that had been well on its way to being a sob. “Get going, you strange man. And I’ll hold you to that.”

Tendo laughed as well, then turned around to pull open Newt’s door and step outside. Before he was all the way outside, however, he stopped himself, one hand on the outside handle, and cast a look over his shoulder – half regretful smile, half frown, the expression of someone prolonging a painful goodbye already said. Newt stared at him, teeth clenched, and waited it out while Tendo fought with himself for a moment longer and then closed the door.

Only then did Newt allow himself to collapse back on his bed and breathe heavily and shakily.

Mako was gone. Tendo was going. Newt knew that he couldn’t bear losing Hermann as well.

\--

“Hermann.”

Newt resumed knocking on Hermann’s door after a minute of quiet and listening to determine if anything had moved in Hermann’s room.

“Hermann, I know you’re in there. It’s just me. Please open the door.”

“Are you looking for me?”

Newt nearly jumped six feet into the air as Hermann’s voice suddenly came from somewhere very close _behind_ him. He turned around and yes, indeed, there was Hermann, looking slightly worn out and stern, but no more so than yesterday.

“Oh my God, Hermann, you could have given me a heart attack!”

Hermann appeared to be caught somewhere between sheepish and indignant.

“Surely that’s an exaggeration.”

Newt scratched his head. His hair was a mess when he got nervous.

“Ah, well… maybe.”

Hermann moved a few steps to the side to make room in the corridor, keeping his eyes on Newt.

“So… you were looking for me?”

“Yes,” Newt said, reminding himself that he was Fearless and Could Totally Do This. “So you know Tendo, right, well, he just came to my room like, a couple of hours ago. He got a job in Silicon Valley can you believe him, well, anyway, he said to get out of here sooner rather than later, that apparently they’re closing down the Shatterdome by the end of this week and want to lure in all the people who don’t have a job by then, I mean, Jesus, Hermann, I don’t think I’ve had a real job in my life, I’ve never been job hunting, it was always academia here, academia there, oh, hello Doctor Geiszler, would you like to work for our military organisation to save the world from an extraterrestrial invading species, we promise it’s fun--”

“Newton.”

Carefully, Hermann placed a hand on Newt’s shoulder. Newt realised he was breathing heavily.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Hermann said, “Come inside.”

\--

Inside, Newt stood awkward, trying to avoid either looking at Hermann or the bed. Hermann sat down in front of his desk. Newt heard the shuffling of papers. Hermann cleared his throat.

“I began looking into this after the debrief with Marshall Hansen. The next flight to Frankfurt Airport leaves tomorrow at six pm. The train to Berlin takes about five hours.”

Newt was confused by the turn of this conversation.

“If you don’t want me to look into this for you, you have to tell me, Newt. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

Newt looked up to find that Hermann had half turned and was eyeing Newt carefully. Newt shook his head. “No, I mean…”

He rubbed his eyes. “You’re not making me uncomfortable. Please continue.”

“I have a standing offer from the TU Berlin to return at my leisure. I informed them I would like to return sooner rather than later, and they offered their help with providing housing as well. They sent an offer just two hours ago.”

He hesitated.

“I accepted their offer.”

Newt’s stomach dropped. Once again, his world shifted out of focus for a second, then put itself together into a new and unrecognisable picture.

“Oh. Alright.” Newt swallowed heavily. “Well, I’m happy for you.”

Hermann half turned on his desk chair. He was searching for something in Newt’s face, his brows furrowed.

“It’s a two-bedroom apartment. You could come.”

The relief was more prominent than the unease he’d felt around Hermann since last night. Though unease wasn’t the right word, probably – he feared losing Hermann more than he feared having him around, even if Hermann should turn out to want too much.

He looked at Hermann and saw hesitation on his face. Hermann, Newt realised, was unsure what had sent Newt running yesterday, but he was willing to keep trying, politely but insisting. Hermann’s cane was leaning against the desk, and one of Hermann’s hands was rubbing over his bad leg – not as tense as it used to be, though, Newt could tell that from the set of Hermann’s lips, and when had he learnt to do that? As if he’d needed another reminder of how deeply he cared for Hermann.

Newt wanted to tell Hermann thank you, and that he’d like to join him in Berlin.

“I’m asexual,” he blurted out instead.

Hermann’s expression was puzzled at first, but as Newt watched relief flooded his face.

“Oh Newton…”

Newt didn’t know what to do with his hands. He vaguely noted that they were shaking, and ended up shoving them into his pockets.

“I didn’t know what to tell you, I never thought I’d have to, but I have this gigantic crush on you and I always end up ruining my relationships, because nobody ever knows what to do with an ace partner. So I’m sorry, but I kind of really don’t want to date you.”

Hermann closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them again, Newt saw that they were glistening.

“I thought… my God, Newton… I thought I’d misread the situation, that I only saw what I wanted to see because I’ve felt… For a long time, I didn’t even know what I wanted, but I draw a great comfort from having you around, and I wanted…”

No, scratch that, Hermann was genuinely _crying_. Newt, suddenly overcome with emotion, crossed the distance between them and bent down awkwardly to embrace Hermann. Hermann hid his face in the fabric of Newt’s t-shirt.

“I’m asexual, Newton.”

“Oh my God,” Newton muttered, and held on a little tighter. Hermann was shaking and he was shaking, and both of them were crying, and they were a mess and so horrifically _bad_ at communicating.

Hermann tucked his head under Newt’s chin, and Newt felt the sudden urge to laugh even though he was still crying.

“We could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble,” he muttered between two shaky breaths.

“We could have indeed,” Hermann agreed.

“Hermann?” Newt asked.

“Yes, Newt?”

“Can we share a bed again? Only if you want to, of course, I don’t know how comfortable you are with physical contact. Is the hugging too much? Oh my God, I’m sorry, I mean…”

Newt let go to find that Hermann was smiling lopsidedly – his eyes were a bit puffy and his nose was red, but he was definitely smiling, and there was happiness on his face that Newt hadn’t seen in a long time.

“Newton?”

“Yes?”

“I’d love to cuddle with you again.”

\--

They ended up in Berlin.

They left Hong Kong Shatterdome the day after, their possessions packed into suitcases and boxes ready to be shipped out. There weren’t a lot of people left to say goodbye to, but Newt left his new Berlin address for Tendo and Mako. Hermann went to thank Hansen for both of them. Then they got on a plane and left.

After several long hours on a plane, and several more hours on several trains, they ended up in Berlin.

It had been twelve years, and Berlin hadn’t changed a bit, and it had changed completely.

It hadn’t changed a bit in that it was still Berlin, chokingly full with hipsters and students and hipster students, full of old people speaking in a dialect that would always remind Newton of his childhood, full of cafés that sold organic soy lattes from environmentally unfriendly throw-away-cups, and full of people with unique ideas waiting for the right person to pitch them. It hadn’t changed a bit in that rent prices were still abysmal, living spaces were too small and the ways to get anywhere were too long.

It had changed completely in the way that a war against an alien species had changed most countries, in this case, economically. It had changed in that people looked tired, worn out, yet some of the elation of the first few weeks after breach closure still echoed through the city. It had changed completely in that TU Berlin now had a whole research branch dedicated to Kaiju science, and the quantum physics department had received a much larger budget than when Hermann had last been here.

Berlin had sports cars, sprawling subway systems and night clubs for Newt to lose himself in.

Berlin had libraries, a river _zum spazieren gehen_ , and lakes instead of the sea for Hermann.

They fit in just fine.


End file.
